Real Rock Band: Play piano like a pro with light keys

After enduring childhood lessons, it’s no surprise many of us give up playing the piano. A technicolour projection screen might put the fun back into learning.

The Projected Instrument Augmentation system (PIANO) was developed by pianists Katja Rogers and Amrei Röhlig and their colleagues at the University of Ulm in Germany. A screen attached to an electric piano has colourful blocks projected onto it that represent the notes. As the blocks of colour stream down the screen they meet the correct keyboard key at the exact moment that each one should be played.

A thin line between each block and the key to be pressed gives the player warning of which note is coming next. Quirks in the lines – such as ripples – advise when to add ornamentations, such as a trill. Each note block is coloured according to which finger should play it, to help improve technique, while the system highlights incorrect notes played in red.

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If this sounds familiar, the way PIANO works is similar to a scaled-up version of Rock Band 3 , the video game where on-screen (rather than projected) notes advance towards a virtual keyboard to tell gamers which notes to play on a small, 1.5-octave keyboard.

“We had quite a few novices use it who were very sceptical at first, but then were really impressed by how quickly they could play relatively well,” says Florian Schaub, who presented the system last month at the UbiComp conference in Zurich, Switzerland.

Formal user studies are now under way and early results seem positive&colon; practising with the system seems to speed learning and improve a player’s musical expression, Schaub says.

But one piano tutor who has seen the video is less than impressed – mainly for artistic reasons. “This may improve technical skill but that, for me, is about all it would do,” says Lucy Smith, a piano tutor and music teacher in London. “It does not allow for an individual’s interpretation of the music. If everyone learned piano using this technology, we would not need countless CDs of famous pianists playing the same pieces of music, because they would all sound the same.”